


Red She-Hulk: Trails and Tribulations

by Patsyy



Category: Marvel (Comics), The Incredible Hulk (Comics)
Genre: Action, Adventure, F/M, Fantasy, Fiction, For Fun!, Gen, Graphic Violence, Profanity, Suicidal Thoughts, Superheroes, Toxic Relationships, Trauma, reference of child neglect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:07:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26917111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Patsyy/pseuds/Patsyy
Summary: On the run for almost a year now, Betty Ross, the infamous Red She-Hulk, makes the decision to risk her identity and location being exposed to the world so she could save the lives of many others. The remnants of the secret orginization, the Intelligencia, are on her tail now as they have found their lost asset and are looking for refund. She walks the trails of Southern California, unexpecting of the fury of revenge coming her way, and unaware of the death and destruction soon to follow.
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Betty Ross
Kudos: 5





	Red She-Hulk: Trails and Tribulations

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note! 
> 
> Beware, reader!  
> TRIGGER WARNING: profanity, graphic violence, reference of child neglect, emotional trauma, damaging/toxic relationships, and thoughts of suicide. 
> 
> Please read at your own discretion and be mindful of these warnings.
> 
> Enjoy one of my first published fics!! I’m excited to have people take a read.

Her eyes opened.

The sensation of warmth returned to her body for the first time in years It felt good, for a moment... then too much warmth. Her muscles straining- her body on fire.

She tried to scream, but gagged instead, her lungs full of liquid. Her arms reached out to feel her surroundings. A smooth, curved piece of glass surrounded her, almost as if she were in a caccoon. 

Where the hell was she?

She threw her arms forward, and to her suprise, the glass around her shattered. After falling from her contaiment with a thud, she clutched her chest, coughing violently. Glass had pierced her skin easily, but she didn't feel it. Her brain couldn't process anything but the pain she felt as her body temperature only increased further. The poor woman felt as if she were going to drop dead on the cold floor then and there, right as soon as she had woken up from a deathly slumber.

Her vision blurred, she looked around on her knees. She could see a whirring red light under what seemed to be an empty doorway. In front of where she knelt was what looked like a few screens and a panel of buttons and switches. 

The woman couldn't recongnize anything about the strange place she was in. The last thing she could remember.... No. Nothing at all.

It smelled like chemicals. Strong. Foreboding. This was not a hospital of some sort, but more of a laboratory. She knew the smell, but didn't know from what.

The barely clothed woman tried to pick herself up but couldn't find the strength. Her arms felt flimsy and weak. She raised one forearm just barely, then used it to drag herself across the glass covered floor. Glass shards dug into her skin. Her nervous system did not react.

There must have been an exit to this place. She would find it, wait to gather her strength, and escape the unfamiliar place.

Suddenly, an alarm began to blare. 

It is was loud like an ambulance siren. She groaned as it overwhelmed her thoughts and irritated her senses. But despite this overloading irritation, she knew one thing: with an alarm, there would be people to address it. There would soon be guards headed her way.

With movements as quick as she could muster the strength for, she slowly crawled over to a large dark opening in a wall, which she assumed was an open doorway. The woman manuevered herself around blurry objects that seemed more like thick and large pipes as she brushed against them. More obviously shaped tables were set across the room with bottle shaped objects and boxes on their faces.

She was so close to the doorway, so near to escape. 

Two sets of feet had stopped in front of her, towering over her sprawled out position. 

"She's awake, far sooner than I calculated..."

A distinctively male voice.

"Where is that weak minded bastard?!" he continued, speaking to the man he stood beside. He looked to the man next to him. "Have you no intuition, Ghost? Get Samson, you mindless oaf."

"Perhaps he is dumber with your brainwashing," the other man, Ghost, suggested with a hint of annoyance in his heavily Russian accent. 

"Perpostuerous! My work is flawless, and do not question that fact. Now get me Samson! I'll keep her busy!"

"Why should I?! Said you had a tranquilizer-!"

"In the makes, you imbecile! Now get the hell out of here get the fool!"

Ghost rushed out of the room in a hurry while the commanding man had stayed. He walked closer to her with slow steps, as if he was approaching a beast with the intent of calming it. A peace offering. Perhaps encouraging it to heel. 

But what could she do? She was laying on the ground like a helpless dying animal, her skin covered in cuts from glass and blood smothered along the path she took to get to the door. What threat could she ever pose?

"Hello," the man spoke, walking towards her. Her eyes were hardly open to analyze him. One thing she could tell right off the bat, however: the man's skin was green. Bulging and throbbing veins covered his distorted and disgustingly elongated head, like his cranium was 3 times the average size. The hair atop his head was a jett black that could hardly cover his oversized scalp. His lab coat was white and tell at his knees, beneath was an orange suit it seemed, from her poor sight.

The green alone made her shudder. Her skin crawled as she felt increasingly uneasy and fearful. She felt like she had known this feeling. Experienced it before. Simply around the color.

God... Where the fuck am I....?

The cool steel floor and colder air met her skin like water feeding a fire. Almost completely unclothed and unprotected from the outside forces, aching down to her bones and begining to feel the stinging of the glass in her skin, she groaned, slowly curling up into a ball. 

"Who... Who—" she struggled to muster a question.

"I am Leader," he remarked. "Destined to rule by my inherent nature. You will adress me as such from now on."

The woman groaned once more, her arms wrapping around her abdomen, gripping tightly as reaction to the overcoming pain and dread she felt. She could feel herself trembling now. She feared the man in front of her, but more than that, she feared the implications of what it meant to be in the room she was in, under the eye of that very man. The Leader.

"I assure you, Ms. Ross, you have nothing to fear," he noted in response to her reaction. "I will not deal any harm to you unless you fail to comply to my demands. Compliance and loyalty will be rewarded."

No, no....

Ms. Ross? 

A thought sparked, behind all the flames enveloping her mind. A pinpoint. A beacon on which to focus. Who she was before...

...It all made sense. The smells of the chemicals, the recongnizable green. 

She was Elizabeth Ross, referred to as Betty by those she held close... Oh God. Where were they?

Her father "Thunderbolt" Ross... He was a taciturn and serious man. He often neglected his daughter, but she could not blame him. He was an army man, he told her. He was serving his country. It was not his fault. But... Where was he? What he always was doing— Not serving the country, not following his duty. He had his own vendetta of hatred. He was always looking for Bruce. 

Bruce. 

The man and the monster. 

She met him through her father's work. They connected easily. The- The experiment went all wrong. Bruce, Bruce, Bruce.... They ran away together when he was being chased by her father. He was a beaten dog, scared and vulnerable. She could not leave him for her own wellbeing. She felt a responsibility and commitment toward him. They were married, for God's sake....

Betty just couldn't take it anymore.

But... She didn't have to.

She had loved that man until the end.

Betty should have been dead.

In her final moments, she remembered feeling her skin suddenly begin peel and flake away and her body ache, tremors of pain shooting to every inch of her body like an unstoppable cancer. The last thing she remembered was seeing was the fear in Bruce's eyes as she fell in his arms, and her mind becoming swallowed by darkness.

Her heart struck against her chest like a hammer on an anvil. Why was she still here?

She wanted to go home. 

She wanted to see her father, wherever he was, and finally be held in his arms. 

She wanted to see Bruce and hear his voice telling her that everything was going to be okay, and that she was going to be okay. They were going to be okay.

She wanted to forget everything she knew about Bruce, and everything she had learned. 

She wanted to endulge in a pretty little lie.

Betty didn't care if she was lied to about her marriage, her father's negligence of his daughter and hatred toward the man she loved, her husband's alter egos, perhaps the true nature of the distinction between the two.

All she wanted was peace for once in her goddamn fucking life.

Her eyes bolted shut as hot tears of anger streamed down her cheeks; they began to evaporate. She felt it sizzle off her skin. A jolt of pain shot up her body. 

Betty's body became dense, her muscles slowly expanding. She tensed up like a petrified corpse, clutching her fists against her bare chest and screaming bloody murder. Her voice broke and became rhaspy with her cries, like she was barely clinging onto life. Her tendons stretched and her bones expanded rapidly. Sinew seemed to tear as it stretched out. Her body was hotter than it ever was before. The pain was excruciating and slow, enough to kill a human within seconds. 

God, she wished the pain was enough to kill her. Put her body into shock. Perhaps Leader would have the pity to put her down like an old dog and end her then and there.

The heat under her skin intensified, becoming hotter and hotter. 

Her thoughts became nothing. 

Strings of words and sounds, senseless and impossible to track.

The Leader watched intently, ignoring her pleading screams for death's embrace. 

Everything went blank.

.

.

.

.

And then it stopped. 

And her eyes opened. 

Betty's vision was cascaded with a filter of yellow, though her vision was clearer.

Her body had felt like she had just taken a dip in a pool of lava, however, it did not reject this change. Perhaps it could now naturally withstand the unbearable heat she had experienced before.

She felt... rejuvinated. Her frailness and her weakness was somehow eradicated. Her mind was clear, her body no longer ached or stung, she could finally see clearly, and her senses were freed from their torture. 

It was like she had emerged from a chrysalis, brand new. 

The green man stepped forward, his hands clamped professionally behind his back.

"We helped you. I helped you," the Leader spoke with a tender voice, unlike the tone he spoke with prior to the transformation that had just then occurred. Ghost stepped into the laboratory, followed by a new companion.

"I don't think she knows whats going on, Leader," the new man mocked. He was shirtless, exposing his body builder physique. A jagged scar reached across his chest and long, spring green hair rested on his wide shoulders. He wore a smug face, clearly trying to get on Leader's nerves. "Too busy monologuing? Perhaps you should explain before she has a drastic reaction."

"Shut that boisterous mouth of yours, Samson," Leader snapped. "So says the Leader. Your preferred field of 'psychological science' was never that of true science. I do not need to put you back in your place, do I?"

Samson's brow furrowed in frustration as he mumbled something illegible, then raised his voice. "Not necessary." He pulled a handgun from a holster on his hip, cocked it, and pointed it at Betty. Her weight was off somehow, like she were signifigantly heavier, and she slowly lumbered up to her feet.

"We are the Intellegencia. Though my incompetent goon is quite worthy of your distrust," the Leader had turned towards Samson, who clicked his tounge, then returned his gaze to Betty. "...We are quite the opposite. So as long as you are loyal to us, most especially to me, we are your friends. Allies. A positive relationship would greatly benefit the both of us."

Samson scoffed. "You think she'll still believe that after she comes to her senses? Perhaps I'm not the only dumbass in the Intelligencia, Leader."

"Shut your damn mou--"

"You... What did you do?" Everyone fell silent when she spoke. With all of her memories coming back to her.. she couldn't even recongnize her voice. It seemed deeper. More brass. She grasped her throat, feeling the vibration of her vocal chords. Her— Her HAND. It was red. Her eyes ran up her wrist and toward her forearm.

"...We brought you back..."

Her mind wandered. Her eyes did not decieve her.

"...a second chance..."

Her bicep. Different. Defined. Enlarged. Grotesque.

"...without disease..."

Her entire body was red. Her hair was black and long, falling over her eyes wildly and ending at her waist. Two streaks of red ran down the hair on her widows peak. 

Her body had signifigant change. More muscular, more exaggerated, heavier and denser, and taller, at that; she was at least a foot taller than the tallest man in the room, Samson, who seemed over six foot. 

God.

She felt like vomiting. She felt disgusted. Above it all, she felt enraged.

"...you are free now, and completely without human struggle." 

"WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?!!" she bellowed, causing Leader and the old Russian man to stagger and Samson to laugh in a cruel delight. The room nearly shook through the amplification of her voice.

"Did not hear damn word that Leader said?! We helped you--!" Ghost snapped. With her vision cleared, she could make out his features much better than she could before. 

Old man, white beard, fading hairline, red robe.

She wanted to know what this man looked like before she would beat him into an unrecongnizable bloody pulp for what he did. No. What they all did.

They all deserved her unbridled rage.

Betty pressed forward.

"WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO TO ME?!"

Samson fired his pistol; a loud shot rang off, and Betty flinched naturally, but felt nothing. Not even a pinch. A bullet casing clinked to the ground lightly. Gunpowder residue sat on her chest. 

He smirked, looking down at the smoke rising from the gun's muzzle. "Well, that confirms something, alri--" 

Betty swung her fist straight across his face, his nose exploding with blood almost instantaneously. He was flung back almost 10 feet into the chemistry set on the lab tables, smashing them upon his descent. She lunged and tackled him with speeds she had never reached before and swung at him again--

\--and within the blink of an eye he sat upward, caught her punch and gave a bloody grin, scarlet liquid oozing from his nose and down his lip. "Now you know what happened to you, don't you? You've got to."

Betty uppercut his abdomen so hard she heard some of his ribs snap in two.

He coughed blood almost instantly as a lung had been pierced by one of his ribs, his teeth gritting and his grip on her fist releasing. 

Betty smiled blissfully as she watched the malicious grin on his face disappear, then swung a right hook across his face.

Samson grunted and barely moved his head to evade the blow. Betty's fist shot through the steel floor with ease as it missed its target. Using this chance, he grappled onto her scalp and pulled her close, slamming his head into hers. She tanked the blow without fail and reacted instantly. The red woman grabbed the hand that held her hair and squeezed, forcing his grip to release by breaking the bones in his hand and snapping his fingers. 

"ARRGHHH!!"

She delivered the right hook that she had missed prior, knocking him to the floor again. He did not get up again. She kneeled over him, a knee at each side of his waist. 

The red woman began beating on him even more. Single swings became continuous rapid punches. 

Three... Five... Eight times.

Suddenly, she hesitated.

Blood covered Samson's face. She could hardly distinguish his blood on her own skin. 

Samson's face was an unrecongnizable pulp of flesh. His eyes caved inward on his face, though swelled up completely to the point he could not open them. The bridge of his nose shot toward the right side and had lost it's straight slant. One cheek was purple and bruised, the other had it's skin torn and bare flesh exposed. The lips were swollen and purple. His entire face had been drenched in his own blood. Saliva dripped down his face from a small opening between his puffy lips that he could not close even if he were conscious.

Was this what she had wanted?

She felt filthy.

This is not the supportive, caring, and kind woman that Bruce had loved.

This is not the bright and talented young woman that Thunderbolt Ross had raised. 

Then her expression lifted at the realization.

Of course.

This was what she had always wanted.

This feeling.

She was finally in charge.

In control.

Betty felt power. Power she had never felt before. And she loved it. She loved beating upon this sick, helpless bastard. She had been on the recieving end of punch-down blows for all her life. At last, power she had been denied throughout her life had been granted to her.

This was a release.

This was her reality; this was the real her that had been forced to stay dormant by the relationships she had endured in her life.

This was pure bliss.

Betty's fist struck his face once more. It was like beating a dead horse.

"She refuses to see reason! Restrain her!" Leader yelled. He had waited but would not stand idly for any longer. 

She could not be reasoned with. Even after her sudden hesitation, she had continued. Her rampage could not be quelled by words, nor the physicality of the Leader's strongest asset.

Another punch. Knuckles striking the bone. 

"Her skin is too hot to touch, let's just—" The Russian man trailed off.

Blood splattered her fists, Samson's body, the walls, the floors. "—Let him handle this."

Skin splitting.

A scoff. 

"He is on the fucking floor, you idiot."

The cocking of a gun.

"Look what the simpleton has done to himself."

Betty clasped her hands together and raised them above her head, ready to bludgeon him and deliver a killing blow—

The quick pop of a gun firing.

The bullet pierced her heart, entering and not escaping. She stayed knealt over Leonard's unconscious-- perhaps even dead-- body, completely still. Betty lowered her arms to fall at her sides and looked at her chest, where the pain was felt the most.

Blood poured out of her wound slowly, like lava. It was yellow and hotter than flame and overlapped the blood that had been splattered all over her. Steam rose from her wound as her exposed flesh was releasing her incredibly high body heat.

Physically unphased and confused, she looked over her shoulder. The Leader stood barely over her head with a smoking handgun in his grasp. A point blank shot.

If she was what she thought she was... A hulk... then how did it pierce?

"Adamantium." He spoke up, as if he read her mind. "Ever heard, Ms. Ross?"

She was silent for a moment.

"...You said you wouldn't," she started.

"I have a relatively more peaceful solution to your little fits in the makes," Leader assessed, "but, unfortunately, you forced our hand. Trust may be a two way street, but loyalty to the Leader is required. I gave you one chance to show it, and you made the wrong decision."

She was silent for a moment, taking it all in. Who— no, what she was now, the desolate lab room, the occult men around her, and the burning pain in her chest. 

Betty had tunnel visioned entirely on Samson and allowed this to occur... No... She didn't allow anything. She did not want this. This was his fault.

But now that she had this power, she would've rather died than give it up. She realized that she was grateful for being given this power. She realized that she was grateful to the man that she had just beaten senseless, and his subordinates. 

No.

They wanted to control her. So as long as she had the ability to stop it, she wouldn't allow herself to be used or deprived of power ever again.

"You did this to me..." She broke the silence, looking down at her new form. "You made me like Bruce..."

"I did what I had to do to aquire loyalty and new service. Use your brain and surrender, so you can save yourself some pain."

"...Why couldn't I have stayed dead?" Her voice was steady and strong, her fists straining. She was angered more than anything.

"You were never quite dead, Elizabeth. Your life has much more value than you assume. Now. Surrender."

"...No." Betty got up to her feet, despite the pain she was enduring. With this power... this was finally her chance to take control of her life. To be the one at the wheel, completely in control of her circumstances. If she knew anything, it was this. "I'm not your toy. I'm not ANYONE's fucking plaything. Not anymore. Not a tool, not a weapon. I won't allow it."

"Oh, Elizabeth," he sighed.

She turned toward him and he backed away, though, without an ounce of fear across his face.

"You have always been our toy, long before the General brought you in. I said your life had value, but not because of anything about you. It is because of your connections to Banner and the US government that you are useful. You will never be anything more than an asset." He pulled a remote from his coat pocket and held it in front of her eyes for a second, teasingly. He pressed a single button.

She grunted, reaching for the remote— Suddenly, a sharp pain struck where the bullet pierced. A powerful sedative had spread. 

Her legs went limp, then her arms.

She felt herself falling. 

The Leader smiled.

All went dark like it had when she had supposedly died long ago.

And the rest was history.


End file.
